What is Cardano?

Cardano is one of the more popular cryptocurrencies out there, while also being one of the oldest ones that is still popular. Cardano was founded back in 2015, by the blockchain development company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), while being run by the co-founder of Ethereum and BitShares, Charles Hoskinson.

Cardano itself is a blockchain technology platform that runs the cryptocurrency known as Ada, which was created in order to create a more sustainable cryptocurrency ecosystem as well as run smart contracts. The overall goal is to create a system that is better for the needs of cryptocurrency users and create a system where it is easy to integrate smart contracts.

From the beginning, a library of papers was created by IOHK, where all the functionalities were described. Some features are quite complex and can only be used by major companies, while other features were described thinking about end users ease. In its current form, Cardano and Ada is primarily used as a way to transfer funds between users, but they are working with companies to provide them a financial settlement system that is safe and secure, due to the nature of the blockchain behind the cryptocurrency platform.

Like most other cryptocurrencies out there, Ada had to be mined by the users in order to grow the overall coin count. The coin quickly became a popular one to mine, despite its relatively low value per coin, as the rewards for doing so were quite high in the beginning. There’s currently around 31.000.000.000 ADA in circulation out of a max supply of 45.000.000.000, so around 2/3 of the total coins are currently in circulation.

As mentioned above, the value of each Ada coin is not particularly high. Ada is currently valued at around $0.25 a coin, which is not a lot compared to the Bitcoin, Litecoin or even Ethereum. But with a massive supply in circulation, Ada is currently the 7th largest coin in circulation based on the market cap. Overall the total market cap of Ada is around $6.000.000.000 at the time of the article (March 2018) and the daily trading volume is around $200.000.000 with 26.000.000.000 Ada coins in circulation.

What Can I Use It For?

As mentioned above, Cardano and Ada has multiple different purposes, which can suit both regular cryptocurrency holders, people looking to transfer funds, small companies as well as larger corporations. It is entirely up to you to figure out if you are looking to get coins to play the financial market, looking to transfer funds from one person to another or if you are looking for an independent blockchain to run smart contracts on.

Transferring funds from one person to another is quite simple, as you simply have to hold Ada in a wallet and transfer them to another person’s wallet. From there the receiving party can place the money in an exchange site and receive fiat funds for the Ada’s or use it as a payment on a service or goods site that accepts the cryptocurrency as a payment method.

If you are looking to play the financial market and bet on the value going up or down, you’ll have to find a site to trade on. You can find more information about doing so in the paragraph below, where we also recommend some safe and secure sites to do so on.

If you are a corporation that is looking for a blockchain platform to integrate into your system as a settlement system or run smart contracts, you will have to read the library of papers that is available on Cardano’s site. Here you can read more about the features they offer and how you can implement it in your company. You can read more about that here.

Trading Cardano

If you are looking to get your hands on some Ada coins in order to use it for some of the purposes mentioned above, or simply looking to get some in the hopes of the value going up long term, you have to make sure that you are going to a site that is safe, secure and reliable in its trading. Finding sites offering this service can be a tough task if you are not familiar with the cryptocurrency industry, but we are here to help you.

We have partnered up with some of the sites that Cardano themselves recommend to trade on and we’ve even written extensive reviews of these sites, so that you can choose the one that suits you the best. Below you will find some of the sites that offers Ada trading and some basic information about the platforms, along with links to the full reviews.

Trading Ada:

BitMEX: BitMEX is one of the most popular trading platforms out there, who offers a small variety of cryptocurrency coins, but have massive volume, making it easy to get trades done while using a simple, but professional platform. You can read more about their platform, the methods of trading and everything else in our BitMEX review here.

Binance: Binance is the biggest trading platform in the cryptocurrency industry, for alternative coins. Here you can trade 50+ cryptocurrencies, including Ada. The site has a clean look and makes it very easy to get started with trading, have easy deposits and withdrawals and great customer support. You can read our full review of Binance right here.

Playing with Cardano

If you have reached our site, there’s a decent chance that you are also a person that likes to gamble a bit. If you are looking to do so with your Ada cryptocurrency coins, you’re out of luck unfortunately, as we have not partnered up with any site that currently offers Ada coins as a payment method for gambling. We are quite sure that there will be some in the near future, especially taking its popularity into account, but at the moment we haven’t found any partners that we can recommend.